I had a 30-minute conversation with Annurag Batra of Exchange4Media discussing Velvet Rope Marketing, Proficorns and much more. Some of my quotes from a report published by Exchange4Media:
- On Velvet Rope Marketing: In every business, there are certain customers who are disproportionately more valuable than the others. We need to take care of these customers very well. But before you do that, you need to identify these customers and see who is the largest contributor to your revenues. Then, it is about creating an experience that ensures that they don’t churn away. When the best customer goes, it’s a big loss for any business, B2C or B2B. It is about creating VRM experience to essentially make sure that they stay on. Then comes the long tail of customers. There are some among them who have great potential to be best customers. It is about identifying them early and reading signals from the data customers leave for brands. Then apply the same ideas by taking data from the attributes of the best consumers. Ensure that the acquisition of new customers is also optimized
- On Proficorns: “Now there is a post-COVID world and consumer behaviour is going to change significantly. CEOs and CMOs in a world, where profits are under pressure, need to look at creating a new path to profitability. That is where I coined the word Proficorn. The mindset of a Proficorn is differnt fom a Unicorn. The definition for Proficorn is a company that is profitable, private and is promoter-funded not public so they have actually built the business with the profits of the business reinvested. In this scenario, there are three key differences in the mindset of a Proficorn and a Unicorn. The first is, at times, a lot of Unicorns tend to fire people. Whereas, Proficorns tend to hire because you got to go against the conventional wisdom. This is a great time to build businesses. If you have the capital to invest right now to make the right decisions on growing your team, you’ll come out very strong.”
I also spoke about Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Best Customer Genome (BCG), the skill sets required to breakthrough in the VRM space and some of the tech trends going forward.
